Luke Ford

J.J. Goldberg writes: For all the rancor in our national discourse over the past decade, it’s hard to remember a moment so dominated by vitriol and mutual loathing as the aftermath of the Orlando shooting. It’s almost as though we’re angrier at each other than at the murderer.
In part it’s the toxic impact of Donald Trump. But he’s merely sharpening the faultlines. Half of us, liberals, are outraged that America still doesn’t face up to the gun problem. The other half, conservatives, are appalled that we don’t look radical Islam square in the face and call it by its name. Those who think it’s all about guns dismiss the very notion of radical Islam problem as a bigoted distraction. Those who think it’s about radical Islam think the gun talk is just liberal whining.
Actually, both explanations are true. Both problems — guns and Islamist radicalism — are real, urgent and maddeningly complicated. Each side has something to teach the other. But that’s not how America works anymore. No, we line up with our teams and fire away at the opposition.

Steve Sailer writes: Commenter Twinkie calls our attention to this characteristic anecdote from 2016, as recounted in the Washington Post article entitled “Inside the Hate-Filled Mind of a Mass Murderer:”

Carter, who was among several patrons Mateen held hostage after they’d tried to take refuge in a club bathroom, told a news conference Tuesday that Mateen asked if there were any African Americans in the bathroom. When one man answered yes, “the gunman responded back to him saying, ‘You know, I don’t have a problem with black people. This is about my country.* You guys have suffered enough.’”

Twinkie comments: “Oh, wow, even mass murdering fanatics/self-loathing homosexuals want to make sure they don’t come off as racists… in the middle of the rampage!”

By the way, you’ll notice that poor Latinos remain completely out of the running in the Oppressed Minority sweepstakes. Here’s Omar taking time out while slaughtering dozens of Latinos to express sympathy for the plight of African-Americans. As a New York Times subscriber, I blame straight white Christian men for Omar’s lack of awareness of how much Latinos have been discriminated against. (By the way, should I also subscribe to the Washington Post for the duration of the election campaign? I sense that the Post is ferociously dedicated to outdoing the Times in 2016 in generating iSteve-worthy content. On the the other hand, while I feel quite calm, I’m not sure if even my good-natured sanity could withstand five months of the WaPo’s mania.)

*As we all know, Omar Mateen was an AMERICAN CITIZEN, born right down the street from Donald Trump. Omar’s reference to Afghanistan as “my country” must have been due to evil Trump brainwaves from the future affecting him via a time portal.

Omar’s massacre couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the inherent tensions in our elites’ grand strategy of Invade the World & Invite the World, because Invade the World & Invite the World is not a thing. It’s just not. Why are you even thinking about it when you haven’t been told to think about it? Before answering, remember that anything you might say goes on your Permanent Record. So it’s probably best for all concerned if you just Shut Up.

COMMENTS:

* The whole Post article really has to be read to be believed. The Pulitzer-Prize winning “reporter” (aptly named A. Nutt) begins by asking “what can science tell us” about Mateen’s motivations…she then interviews a “social psychologist” (God help us all) who delivers herself of the profound insight that “hate of other people is really displaced hate of oneself.” From this it follows that when Donald Trump says mean things about Muslims, it adds to their self-hatred, which then turns into hatred of others, leading to terrorist killing sprees. Or something like that. SCIENCE! Where would we be without it?

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* In a way, one could almost feel sorry for him. He did his (sadly limited) best to express his motivation (i.e., resentment over American bombing of his native country, Afghanistan) – but everybody insists that it must really be something else, instead.

* A similar, but less serious example of this reasoning occurred in Paris in 2013.

Two gays were severely beaten late one night. This happened around the time millions of traditionalists were taking to the streets to protest against the gay marriage law, which later passed. The badly beaten-up face of one of victims, Wilfred de Bruijn, was widely circulated.

Though it wasn’t immediately clear who had done the beating, many blamed the “atmosphere of homophobia” brought about by catholics and right-wingers opposed to gay marriage.

If I recall correctly, it turned out the culprits were “youths”, hardly surprising if you weren’t plugged into the media narrative.

Five months later, four suspects of committing the homophobic beatings were arrested by the police. And indeed they turned out to be “youths” from the suburbs. Two were sentenced a year later. Their names were Taieb and Malik. It’s fair to surmise they were not Catholics worried about preserving the traditional family unit. (As should have been obvious just from the neighborhood where the crime happened). But so much later after the fact, no one was paying attention anymore.

And so the regretful violence had at least the redeeming value of making people more aware of the danger of homophobia and of resisting social progress…

I just saw Anderson Cooper berating a Florida official in charge of helping the Orlando victims and their families for not supporting gay marriage. It’s the same mechanism. If you ever had any doubts about any aspect of gay liberation, don’t you feel guilty now? If not, you’re a fascist and a murderer.

* Omar Mateen lived in Fort Pierce, Florida, which is 40.9% black and 21.6% Hispanic. The city has a female mayor and two of its four city council members are named Rufus and Reginald (no need to click on their pictures to figure out what race they belong to). It’s so “diverse” that it’s pretty good odds that city council will be 100% non-white within 20 years.

Somehow a brown, Muslim Democrat from a diverse city slaughtering other Democrats is the fault of Republicans. It always is.

* Watching the 10 pm tv news the spin is very predictable. They downplayed his gayness and brought out some Muslim cleric who denounced violence and stated that Islam was a tolerant religion that loves everybody. However, I noticed he was a cleric of the Ahmadiyya sect, a persecuted minority within Islam based in Pakistan. The media always go to this unrepresentative sect for soundbites. This is part of the program of lying to the American public. The more one pays attention the more one realizes how everything is spin.

* The disturbing thing to me about this and the San Bernardino shooting is that they’re laying down a new pattern for crazy people inclined toward mass shootings, especially if they’re Muslim.

This zero called 911 to proclaim his allegiance to ISIS just before he went on his murder spree. I think the San Bernardino idiots did something like that with a Facebook post right before or during their murder spree. That didn’t make any difference anywhere else except in making sure their mass shootings would get more attention.

The Orlando shooter also declared allegiance to a couple of other Islamic terrorist groups that are at war with ISIS–I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess he wasn’t exactly a scholar of radical Islamic movements. (Or probably anything else.). He associated himself with those movements to get more attention for his crime.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* How the Hell, even in these PC addled times can one possibly equate mass murder with the express intention of murder, which succeeded and destroyed the lives of 50 human beings – who if given the opportunity to speak beyond the grave would have given *anything* to survive, with the indecent and lewd touching with fingers of an unconscious and non consenting woman?

Sick is not the word for it.

Such is the venom and depth of hatred the totem pole devotees have for straight white men.

* Nice. Like there’s a valid link Omar and Brock, as though shooting 100 people and having the highest shooting death toll in the US is remotely in the same ballpark as getting drunk and raping a co-ed.

Trying to do their damndest to keep that great white defendant in the public’s eye. Ridiculous.

* As one wag on Twitter (roughly) put it, “Why are we going after Peter Thiel for spending $10M to end Gawker when it took $20M for Chris Hughes to do the same thing to TNR”

* Turner’s sentence was 6 months, not 3. Three is the hypothetical minimum timed served.

He also did not commit rape since his penis likely never even touched her much less penetrated her, rather he seems to have had his hand down her pants.

From the article:

“As the sociologist Michael Kimmel has argued, while we talk ad infinitum about guns, mental illness and, in this case, Islamic identity, we miss the strongest unifying factor: these mass murderers are men, almost to the last one.”

No, not really. From what I can tell, a decent percentage of Muslim suicide bombers are women, maybe 20% during the Iraq occupation and second Palestinian intifada. And plenty of Chechen women too. The percentage is certainly higher than, say, the percentage of women who die in conventional combat or in law enforcement.

Muslim men are about 30 times more likely than white men to go on mass stranger-killing sprees. But Muslim women seem to be about infinity times more likely than white American women, as I do not think a white American woman has ever done so in the past three decades.

The last time western white women engaged in terrorism might have been the Weather Underground and similar communist terrorists in Germany in the 70′s. It was a softer terrorism though, planting bombs usually at night, or with a warning first to allow an evacuation.

* “The Hypermasculine Violence of Omar Mateen…”

Except for the small problem that Mateen’s wife knew about his plans, and supported them. The wife of the San Bernardino terrorist actually killed people. Where does their evil rate next to Brock Turner’s?

Brock Turner was some dumb, horny college kid who in a moment of drunkenness went way too far. Noor Salman, Mateen’s wife was, while sober, perfectly willing to accept the murder of dozens of Americans.

By the way, why am I not surprised that The New Republic doesn’t allow comments on its articles? They would get absolutely torn to shreds on this one.

* I think the focus on the Brock Turner case started as just a purposeful distraction from the Okinawa rape/murder incident involving a US citizen, who was also former military.

Of course it was censored in US media but surprisingly never came up on iSteve iirc, despite the high profile; eg Obama himself was berated by Japanese politicians.

Not that race baiting doesn’t motivate the media too, but real convenient for a mix of political/internationalist/military interests to have that go down the memory hole, replaced instead with some stupid college athlete.

* I think this article is completely inadequate, since while Brock Turner and Omar Mateen are easily linked, she did not address the hypermasculinity of Harambe the Gorilla, or the male sense of entitlement of the little boy who went into the gorilla enclosure.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Liberals declare, as though a self-evident truth: “We can’t go to war with the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.” Why not? For decades we were at war with that other ideology bent on world domination, communism. Roughly the same number of people were communists in the 1950s as are Muslims today. (Tally up the populations of Red China, the USSR, North Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and so on.) We had a sign at the border, too: “Commies Keep Out!” We had in effect a religious test based on your beliefs: If you served the Communist Party, you couldn’t hold certain jobs or participate in the military, even if you were legally an American citizen.

* While in school during the late 1980s, my school offered a course entitled “Communism: One third of the World”. One third of the world is a much larger proportion than one fifth.

* Yes, last night 11 out of 10 late night talk show hosts all denounced guns and those dirty NRA no-goodniks who allow us to own guns. Is there like a journolist II that sends out talking points from the Hillary campaign?

I get the feeling though that this is starting not to work. Hillary said in 2008 that she had not shattered the (imaginary) glass ceiling but that there were now lots of cracks in it. I get the feeling that there are beginning to be cracks in the Democrat coalition.

You have to be pretty desperate to try to connect Omar Mateen to the white frat boy “rapist” from Stanford as if nobody is going to notice that there is a little something different about Omar. And while there are lots of low information voters, most people, no matter how stupid, realize on some level that guns do not walk into nightclubs and go on rampages by themselves. And there is the little detail that Omar was a professional security guard and even in most countries where they don’t allow ordinary people to have guns, security guards have access to them.

Besides being an obvious red herring, the anti-gun crowd has to explain how, if we are not going to build a fence (and god forbid we should do such a thing), it is possible to smuggle across 11 million human beings and mucho tons of drugs every year, but there’s no way that guns will come across the border once we make them illegal here.

You can TRY to change the subject but now you have the candidate of one of the two major parties loudly NOTICING and saying the I-word and it’s going to be hard to memory hole Omar’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State and retcon him into a hateful white man like George Zimmerman. Maybe if he had changed his name to Omar Zimmerman?

You can denounce Trump as a badthinking racis’ and try talking about guns instead but he is going to be on the teevee every day at least from now until November so it’s not going to be that easy to shut him up like some poor schmuck whom you can force out of his job for having said a bad word. Even Hillary had to (reluctantly) say the I-word in order to avoid being outflanked by Trump or looking like a total fool.

* It is very characteristic of ideological regimes that are on the ropes that as your position becomes more and more tenuous, you insist on ideological purity even more. If you allow even one whisker of the camel’s nose into your tent then the whole camel may follow, and you can see that the camel is not far away any more but he is right there pushing on your tent flaps . The Inquisition really got going once the position of the church was threatened by the Reformation. The Chinese Communist Party is cracking down on dissent now, because they realize that their legitimacy is in question. They view Gorbachev’s perestroika as an object lesson in what NOT to do.

So the desperate measures (such as no longer maintaining even a pretense of objectivity in the news pages) are a sign of weakness, not strength.